Chris Schlarb is someone I don’t really know. We are acquainted via his being part of I Heart Lung, a music group I rather like, and my having written some review-type stuff on them. But one of the beauties of the World Wide Web is that it fosters connectivity. And not long ago Schlarb sent me a Facebook e-mail about a project he’s developing: “It’s a documentary film on ice cream truck drivers called We Scream: Voices from the Ice Cream Underground.”
Chris has lived in Long Beach all his life, and, as with most of us, the ice-cream man was a part of his childhood. “It seemed magical the way he would just pop up,” he recalls. And like most of us, he never gave the whole thing much thought. That is, until a few years ago, when his children (now 8 and 11) became cognizant of the phenomenon. Suddenly he found himself wanting “to learn more about this job and its place within community and even working society.”
“I don’t have grand aspirations as a filmmaker,” he told me later. “We Scream is [just] a project that I needed to check of my list of ‘things to do before I die.'” This is what Richard Rorty would call a private (as opposed to public) project, one done to please oneself, to scratch an itch, not motivated by desire to make the world a better place. And that’s fine. It seems to me that, so long as it doesn’t impinge on others (and I think we’re on safe ground with Schlarb here), individual self-realization, no matter how idiosyncratic, is a good thing. Why good? Well, don’t you like to be fulfilled? I sure do! Beyond that, individual fulfillment tends to bleed over into the public realm: it makes for happier people, healthier people—and thus better workers, better neighbors, better parents, better friends.
But one man’s fulfillment might be something another would just as soon avoid. And I’m not going to lie to you: I didn’t read Schlarb’s missive and say to myself, “My god, finally the story will be told!” But to be sure, my own range of interests, even if passably eclectic and broad, covers only a terribly small percentage of the virtually infinite aspects of life. And it’s always a good thing to broaden one’s horizons. Isn’t it?
My friend Jae is a bright and good-hearted person. But she cares more about Israelis than about Palestinians. It has nothing to do with bigotry; it’s just that she’s an American, and a Jew, and been to Israel, and knows a few Israelis, and hears how bad things are for them—the wanton murder, the living in fear. She cares more about Israelis because she knows more about Israelis, can empathize with them much more easily because of what she’s seen and heard. Their plight is somehow more real to her, their pain for affecting, their actions more comprehensible.
It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s not because she’s an American, a Jew, etc. Even without converting to Islam, if she simply traveled to Gaza and befriended some Palestinians, the scales would balance. But she’s not going to do that. She’s going to continue to bear witness only to that with which she is already familiar. And so this bright, good-hearted person will remain in a place where the suffering of all innocent people is equal in theory but not in practice. Such is the limiting power of underexposure.
That doesn’t seem to have much to do with ice cream. But it’s a patchwork world, with seemingly unrelated pieces woven together—sometimes by proximity, sometimes by practice. I don’t know how much it matters if we have a better understanding of mobile ice-cream vendors in and of themselves; but I’m pretty sure it matters a great deal generally to engage in the practice of better understanding if we want a better world, because understanding has very much to do with how the seams hold, both on the most well-lit areas of the world stage and right here in the most unilluminated corners of Long Beach. And guess what? Paleteros and boxy trucks blaring music-box versions of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” the BombPops and Pixy Stix—this is part of “the fabric of society,” our society; and it’s a patch most of us haven’t been exposed to except as excited children with handfuls of change. But what is life like on the other side of that rectangle opening? How does the world look and feel from in there?
That’s what Chris wants to find out. He’ll make his film and check it off the list, one deathbed regret averted. Good for him. What might the rest of us get out of it? Perhaps more understanding—which, unlike ice cream, is something you cannot have too much of. If I get to peek behind the scenes as you do whatever it is you do, the next time I see you doing it I’ll have an easier time looking through the function being performed and spotting the performer, the person, you. I know that until receiving Chris’s e-mail I had never thought specifically about the ice-cream man as a person, about his (or her) own unique struggles to make all of the ends meet; it was just part of the landscape, an occasional surface experience—the neighbor kids lined up ahead of me, the peeling photographic menu on the side of the truck, this guy I never really saw as he patiently waited for prepubescent Greggory to decide between a Strawberry Shortcake Bar and that triptych of Fun Dip.
Will it be an interesting film? I haven’t the foggiest. It almost doesn’t matter, as its very existence holds metaphorical value: it’s a chance to see that which you might never have seen. It’s a chance to learn more about your community of individuals. It’s a chance to know the “Other,” even if just a little bit. That seeing, learning, knowing—doesn’t it lead to better understanding, to increased empathy? And doesn’t empathy between community members beget a better community? It certainly seems like a chance worth taking.